“The world has become my oyster, but I lost my appetite.”

From: Pay As You Go by Eskor David Johnson

And now for something completely different. This book. Some words that come to mind (and I could see plastered all over the cover) are: adventurous, imaginative, original, witty, frenzied.

The story is a self-proclaimed fable and it is about Slide, a young man who for unknown reasons has lost his memory, looking for a place to live in Polis, a fictional city with its own map in the front of the book.
And it is a fable. Including a sleeping lady in the attic that needs saving and a biblical flood, but it’s also a super smart commentary on real world western society and the struggle to make a life. And all this with a great, sometimes laugh-out-loud sense of humor.

“Rolling up the windows was about as useful a precaution as a breathing hole in a casket”

“He is the worst kind of bureaucrat - low-level and long-serving, motivated by frustration.”

Slide is the ultimate optimist - or is it naivety? - and his clever solutions for the complicated situations he gets himself in, are a marvel to watch. I could see this being adapted as a technicolor cult classic movie or tv series.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Thank you @prhinternational, @netgalley, but especially the author @sqorio for the eARC.

"Pay As You Go" is a captivating novel that delves into the intricacies of the human relationships while taking us on a fantastic voyage.. Set against the backdrop of 'city life', Johnson's prose is vivid and evocative, transporting readers into a surreal world filled with rich cultural nuances and brutal satire.

Between the blurb and the fact that this is a McSweeneys published book, I was expecting something more snarky, light, and fast paced. But, this debut is definitely more in the mood of dystopia and the pace is much slower than I anticipated. I didn't finish this one.

This debut novel is unlike most of my fiction reading, so I was pleasantly surprised that the dystopic absurdity drew me forward through Slide's journey through Polis, looking for his perfect home. I enjoyed meeting the quirky characters and getting to know the city through Slide's inventive point of view.

I don't know how to put this novel into a category, but I know that it will reward the adventurous fiction reader with images and sentences that will stay in mind long after closing the book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and McSweeney's for a free copy for review.

Slide's adventures in the city of Polis, where he is looking for a place to live, will no doubt resonate with readers who have the patience to push through the circles and circles and so on of this big novel. It initially reminded me a bit of Dickens but then there's echoes of Wolfe and others. I know I'm going to be the odd one out who DNF but this just exhausted me. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. While it wasn't for me, there's a lot of talent here. For fans of literary fiction.

This novel, while fun to read and full of good stories, suffered for me merely as a result of poor timing on my part. I usually try to choose material vastly different from that preceding it, and having just read an excellent dystopian novel set in a city in decline, could not help but comparing it, and given the length of this one, could not finish it.

Great book! One of the best first novels I have ever read. It was funny and entertaining but also really made you think about how all any of us want is a place to call home.

Many thanks to NetGalley and McSweeney's for the free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I struggled with this one, in all honesty. Slide is in search for the ultimate apartment and along the way, he finds some very odd places to stay. That pretty much sums it up with the setting being a "imaginative odyssey". Not my usual read and I did not particularly enjoy it. If you read the reviews and think it sounds fun, definitely give this one a whirl.

Would you expect anything less than an oyssey?

Slide is a barber and new to Polis. He mistakenly thinks he will easily blend in and find a superb place to live. Instead he moves from place to place, each a fresher disaster than the last. From tents to well lit hellholes, each place brings new larger than life characters with stories that link to the last. Slide in undaunted and continues to search for the perfect place, all the while, racking up strange experiences and scarier characters. An urban contemporary story with ribbon of lore and family tall tales woven through, Pay As You Go will consume you ! #McSweenys #Payasyougo #eskordavidjohnson

An unbelievably contemporary, urban odyssey that takes you on an eventful journey that feels like a long overdue catch-up with that friend that lives on the other side of town.

It's an oddly relatable story for whoever has lived in a big city for at least a couple of years. You'll find the mindset, the sense of hope that easily can turn into despair, the house-hunting struggle, and all those random characters crossing your path that are only true for the big city people. There's a specific degree of madness and attitude you find in yourself to survive the city, and it's all in here.

We follow Slide, who tells us in his story in first person, through a very peculiar but still ordinary spiral of events, searching for a place to call home. Slide catapults us in a never-ending present full of random signs of carpe diem, and acts like we would, sometimes endorsing them and other times fearing them wholeheartedly. It's a quest through the multi-faced metropolis reality, painted as a sort of mercurial god on a constant whim, that pull the strings of a mere mortal testing his character and willing to live in its unsettling, cruel realm.

Every encounter in Slide's journey is connected to the previous one in some way, driving the story on this continuous present where different worlds (the metropolis neighbourhoods) collide, burn and rise at the same time. We get to experience the full circle in the end, and it's refreshing to read something so different, in terms of story structure and message; in fact, I don't think I've come across anything similar to this novel before.

I really enjoyed the writing style, fresh and rich. The tone is ironic and genuine, yet poignant, and naturally pleasant in its realism. Slide is a lovable, relatable character that, as many of us, is just trying to figuring out what to do with his life, looking for beauty and a purpose to motivate himself to improve and ultimately find peace within.

I realized pretty early on that this was just not a good fit for me and do not wish to give a book a poor rating simply because I am not the target audience.